OPINION:
Joe Biden, the guy who quite a few Democrats want to see as the next president of the United States, said he’d go after Immigration and Customs Enforcement for daring to deport illegals arrested for drunken driving.
This is all that’s wrong with Democrats, wrapped in a big old Joe Biden bow.
Tough on crime only when it’s politically expedient. Loosey-goosey on law and order when it involves potential, emerging, hoped-for, solicited Democratic voters — also known in political circles as illegal immigrants.
“They go off to school wondering [if] their mom comes and picks them up — [or if] she [is] not going to be there because an ICE agent was there to arrest her,” Biden said in a Vice News interview.
And at first glance, it might seem like Biden was speaking of, say, the plight of poor American children who kiss their parents goodbye at the school entrance — only to learn later that day that mom or dad, or worse, both, were killed by an illegal driving while drunk.
But he wasn’t.
Biden was speaking of the kid whose illegal mom or dad gets arrested for driving while drunk. Are you kidding me?
It gets worse.
Biden also went on to say that those who arrest and try to deport illegals for the crime of driving while drunk are the ones who ought to be punished.
“You’re going to get fired,” he said, Fox News reported. “You’re fired if in fact you do that. You only arrest for the purpose of dealing with a felony that’s committed, and I don’t count drunk driving as a felony.”
Justice, Democrat-style. Why not just abolish ICE and be done with it? Democrats, of course, have been calling for just that for some time.
Meanwhile, American citizens who drive while possessing even the teensiest of tiniest of bits of alcohol percentage points over the legal limit are subject to massive fines, loss of licenses, costly court appearances, job demotions or firings, mandated and pricey driving classes and driving-under-the-influence warning courses, and substantial jail time — and that’s if nobody is even injured or, God forbid, killed. That’s simply for driving under the influence.
Illegals shouldn’t just face the same. They should face deportation. Politicians who cared more for U.S. citizens than for illegals would make that threat of deportation clear. At least with the messaging.
Both the Cato Institute, in October of 2019 and the National Center for Biotechnology Information — a division of the National Institutes for Health — in 2017 looked at the correlation of illegal immigration and drug- and alcohol-related deaths in the United States, and found little-to-none.
From the NCBI: “This study provides evidence that undocumented immigration has not increased the prevalence of drug or alcohol problems, but may be associated with reductions in these public health concerns.”
From Cato: “Our results show that illegal immigrant populations are not correlated with alcohol-related traffic deaths.”
However: Common sense, sanity and simple compassion will tell that any injury or death due to a drunken illegal is one that would not have occurred if that illegal were not — illegally — in the United States in the first place.
Common sense, sane and compassionate politicking will tell, too, that presidential candidates ought to stand on the side of citizens, not illegals.
And if that common sense isn’t convincing enough, consider this: Mexico doesn’t let foreigners with DUIs into the country. Neither does Canada.
“Foreigners with recent (in the past 10 years) drunk-driving criminal convictions are generally refused entry at the border when trying to travel into Mexico,” Robert Miller & Associates law firm reported. “[And] Canada is a problem with people with a DUI conviction … [they] must seek a waiver of exclusion from Canadian authorities.”
Biden had a chance to score some easy campaign points by calling out drunken-driving illegals as the criminals worthy of deportation they are and as the threat they present to law-abiding society. But he couldn’t even do that.
Unfortunately for America, that’s how the left rolls these days.
Even a drunken driving illegal, to Democrats, has just as many, if not more, constitutional rights as a U.S. citizen. What an utter, despicable and horrific shame.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.